While as The Guardian noted, various types of dream-infiltrating techniques have existed for millennia, with abstract artist Salvador Dali using similar tactics to help spark his creativity, technology and the prevalence of devices like Amazon’s Alexa has experts particularly concerned about the potential for companies to implement these advertising tactics on a broader scale and perhaps without consumer consent.
“Something like 30 million people have these listening, Alexa-type devices in their bedroom. And those devices can play anything they want whenever they want and advertisers could buy advertising time, [for adverts] they want played at 2.30 in the morning,” Stickgold elaborated. “You could have this sort of 1984 situation where advertisers buy advertising time on these devices, and nobody ever knows they’re hearing them.”
While this all sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode, not everyone is too concerned over the impending threat of sleep-based advertising technology, namely Dr. Deirdre Barrett, the psychologist and Harvard professor who Coors tapped to appear in the advertisement. In a post shared to her Medium page discussing this blowback, Barrett, who noted that many of her “colleagues doing clinical work with dreams” tended to have “positive” feedback on the commercial, says that while she can understand the experts’ concerns as outlined in their letter, she questions the feasibility of a dystopian, spons-con REM-filled future.
“I completely agree with the passionately expressed core premise of that letter: the absolute ethical unacceptability of ‘passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission’ that the letter predicts will follow these few dream-linked advertisements,” Barrett explained. “However, I believe the call for ‘new protective policies [that] are urgently needed’ reflects a lack of familiarity with current statutes barring deceptive advertising,” she continued, noting that at a bare minimum, “any attempt to play ads designed for sleepers would have to feature anti-deception statements for every advertisement that was going to play that night.”
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